Thursday, January 10, 2019

Fox News Host Kills a Trump Big Lie

by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist

Back in the good old days - last week - when Donald Trump would get to howling about the need to build a grand wall along the southern border, the threat of terrorists entering the country from the south was always a staple of his appeal - drugs, criminals, and terrorists -  a deadly triumvirate of awfulness that was going to sink the United States and make us no better than them.

But now, quite suddenly and very quietly, the threat of terrorism has been dropped from Trump's stand-up routine on the need for a big wall.

It should come as no surprise to anyone that a man who lies with almost every breath he takes would wind his minions up and send them out to lie as well, and this week the wall of lies emanating from the White House began to show some fissures - cracks big enough to drive a caravan through.

White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a chronic liar, went on Fox News Sunday last weekend to spread some manure about Trump's Great Wall.  Normally Fox would be a safe place to dump a load of Trump administration excrement, but this particular Sunday the show's host, Chris Wallace, just wasn't having it.

Wallace began by noting that Homeland Security Secretary Kirsten Nielsen had claimed that Customs and Border Protection (CPB) had stopped over 3,000 "special interest" aliens along the southern border.   Wallace elucidated that special interest aliens are just people who happen to have come from countries that have produced a terrorist in the past, and they themselves are not terrorists.

Sanders grabbed the bait and attempted to show that the U.S. southern border is a sieve through which terrorists enter the country.  She began with "We know that roughly nearly 4,000 known or suspected terrorists come into our country illegally, and we know that our most vulnerable point of entry is the southern border."

However, before she could continue with that spurious bit of logic that never really connected the terrorists to the border, Wallace interrupted her.  "I know that statistic.  I didn't know you were going to use it, but I studied up on this."  He continued, "Do you know where those 4,000 people are captured?  Airports."  Then to frost his fact-checking cupcake, Wallace cited (on three separate occasions during the interview) a Trump State Department report which stated there are "zero terrorists" infiltrating the southern border.  Zip, nada, none!

In the two days that followed Vice President Pence and Secretary Nielsen continued to push the bogus terrorist claims, and Pence maintained the statistic about the 4,000 terrorists to justify a wall along the southern border.   However, White House Counselor Kellyanne Conway, wife of George the Twitter star, finally admitted that the claim linking 4,000 terrorists to the southern border was an "unfortunate misstatement."

That evening Donald John Trump went on live national television to make his case for a border wall directly to the American people.  The speech was brief, just 1,122 words - with none of them being terrorists, terrorism, or any variant thereof.  A Fox News host with a surprising amount of integrity had driven a stake through the heart of that big lie.

Great work, Chris Wallace.  Thanks for putting America first.

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